The Abandoned (2007)

Taglines: Death never runs out of time.

In 1966, somewhere in Russia, a wounded woman drives a truck to an isolated farm with two babies. Forty years later, the film producer Marie Jones leaves her daughter in California and travels back to her home land in the wilderness of Russia. Marie is one of the children and had received a phone call from the notary public Andrei Misharin, who told her where the farm of her family is located. Marie arrives at the abandoned house and meets the stranger Nicolai, who tells her that he had also received a call from Misharin and he is her twin brother. Weird things happen in the house and Marie and Nicolai are haunted by zombie-like ghosts of themselves. Further, they find that they are trapped in the house and can not leave the place.

The Abandoned is a 2006 horror film co-written and directed by Nacho Cerdà, about an American film producer who returns to her homeland, Russia, to discover the truth about her family history. It is an international co-production between Bulgaria, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

The Abandoned was first released in the US as part of the After Dark Horrorfest in November 2006. The film received a stand-alone release in cinemas in February 2007. The total domestic gross was $1,331,137, and the total worldwide gross was $4,153,578. The DVD was released on 19 June 2007 and includes a short “Behind the Scenes” featurette.

Film Review for The Abandoned

Spanish director Nacho Cerda’s English-language horror film “The Abandoned” has been rather unceremoniously dumped into U.S. theaters sans previews by Lionsgate. A pity, since this is just the kind of offbeat genre piece that might have benefited from stroking buzz among serious genre aficionados. Those looking for formula slasher fare may be less appreciative, since the pic’s brand of arty, surreal Euro-horror is more beloved by cultists than teenage mallrats. Minimally plotted but beautifully atmospheric nightmare will just pit-stop in Stateside hardtops before moving on to ancillary formats.

After a prologue (“Somewhere in Russia, 1966”) that shows a bloodied woman in a truck living just long enough to deliver twin infants to rural neighbors, the pic jumps ahead 40 years. Marie (Anastasia Hille) is an American movie producer with a look of perpetual stress. Raised as an adoptee, she knows she was born Russian, but has never been able to discover anything about her biological parents. Until now, that is, since a notary (Valentin Ganev) has called her to Russia with surprising news of inherited property.

Uninterested in owning a derelict farm, yet curious to find any clues about her family (particularly since her mother was apparently murdered not long after giving birth), she hires a surly driver (Carlos Reig-Plaza) to take her to the remote area. It turns out to be a virtual island, one bridge linking it to a mainland otherwise cut off by river and flood waters.

Once they arrive in the middle of the night, the driver promptly disappears. Marie finds a main house in sufficiently poor repair to suggest no one has been near it for decades. Yet there are disturbing noises and elusive human cries before a terrifying apparition sends her fleeing into the forest, where she trips, plunges into the river and nearly drowns.

When she awakens, she discovers she was saved by Nicolai (Karel Roden), who has been here a couple days. He, too, was summoned by the notary, and evidence suggests these two wary strangers might be long-lost siblings. Breaking up this uneasy reunion are dual apparitions who look all too much like the battered, dead-eyed (yet ambulatory) corpses of the living visitors.

“We are haunting ourselves — the house wants us back,” Nicolai muses. He eventually deduces that destiny intended the twins to die with their mother in 1966, at the hands of a brutish father. Now time is turning back on itself, re-creating that night’s hellish events to belatedly claim the lives of the children who survived.

Weakest point here is not that the script’s logic is flimsy, but that the characters (especially Nicolai) have flat-footed moments trying to “explain” it. Like the best works of Mario Bava, Dario Argento or their young U.S. inheritor Dante Tomaselli, “The Abandoned” works best as a macabre fever dream whose sheer potency of highly worked image and sound overcome half-hearted attempts at narrative coherence.